Escape Pod Reviews (148-163)

• No. 148. "Homecoming at the borderlands Café" by Carole McDonnell (read by Stephen Eley). Boy, this may have to be almost a separate post; it's been over a month since I listened, and I still rememebr a lot to say about it. The story takes place in a Wyoming after The United States has divided itself into separate nations along the lines of "red states" (the Confederacy) and "blue states" (Columbia). In the Confederacy, Jim Crow is still the law, but a young man is returning from his stay in Columbia with his African-American wife and their child. The narrator is an "open-minded" Confederate, but his language betrays a disturbing amount of racism in the society and in his own mind. The portrayal of racism across generations is nuanced, highlighting the tensions that can be caused by even the smallest disagreements.
  
  But the story starts sliding into Fox News–style fair-and-balanced-ism when we learn why the couple left Columbia. Apparently, in the blue states, atheism is the law, and the couple has returned to the Confederacy because of new legislation that promises to remove the children of theists (or possibly just Christians, I can't recall), labeling them unfit to be parents. The racism portrayed in the story is a problem now, as can be seen by a brief look at the U.S. presidential race, and the legal structures of segregation potrayed in McDonnell's confederacy were, at the very least, very much in place de jure mere decades ago. But the anti-theism portrayed in Columbia exists nowhere except, perhaps in a far future where several legal protections in the United States have been explicitly removed. As I've discussed before, Christians have a place of privilege in the United States, and they claim attacks on their religious beliefs when steps are taken to promote equality. By contrasting these two perspectives, McDonnell props up the anti-Christian strawman and cheapens the racism portrayed elsewhere in the story.
  
  And yet listening to the story, all I could think of was Nona, the Native-American girlfriend of the "open-minded" narrator. By the end of the story, he's decided to propose to the woman that he's been keeping at a distance, in large part because of his "less open-minded" family. But after listening to the inside of his head, I worry that there's a lot of pain in her future.
  
  Finally, I was a bit upset that Eley deliberately added a Southern accent to portray members of a small Wyoming town. It goes against the text and fuels the myth that the "red states" are all the same, and that the Southern drawl is the only language that racists speak.
  
  
• No. 149. "Union Dues - All That We Leave Behind" by Jeffrey R. DeRego (read by Stephen Eley). Superpowers don't help a depressed teen. This whole story didn't do anything for me. I can't even remember whether or not I finished it. It's set in a continuing supers universe, but I this story didn't do much to introduce me to it. And it wallowed in its depression like a teenager, and while it may have been authentic, it was not particularly interesting. The impression that I have now is that the protagonist was kind of like Strong Sad, I guess.
  
  
• No. 150. "This, My Body" by Jeremiah Tolbert (read by Stephen Eley). A holy man fuse sex and food into his own flesh. I listened to this story (and the two following) while getting 100% pickups on Metroid Corruption. And while the central premise seemed detailed and thought-out, it wasn't (ahem) to my taste. This episode falls into that class of stories that I occasionally hear that make me glad I'm exposed to sf stories that I'd have no reason to seek out. Eley's high-pitched character had few lines, so I was able to get through it.
  
  
• No. 151. "Behind the Rules" by Stephanie Burgis (read by "MA in PA"). A clone reconsiders her instruction manual. Again, I was playing Metroid, and I remember the game more than the story. But I do recall thinking that the premise of this story (unlike "This, My Body") was something I'd heard several times before, and I made a slightly more deliberate choice not to pay less attention.
  
  
• No. 152. "The Big Guy" by Mike Resnick (read by Stephen Eley). Robots join the NBA, hijinx ensue. This is a recent story, but it felt like a much older one. In fact, it was very reminiscent of "The Mighty Casey" from The Twilight Zone. The specifics of the climax are differnt, but the general plot is the same.
  
  The big problem I had with the story involved the ending. The final scene continues for an absurdly long time. I understand the need for exposition in the denouement to wrap up loose ends, but this closing scene dwelled on the main characters talking without any emotional change; they just kept repeating their positions. It honestly sounded like the author was vamping to bump up a word count.
  
  
• No. 153. "Schwartz Between the Galaxies" by Robert Silverberg (read by Stephen Eley). Hooboy, another controversial story, but I think I'll have less to say about it. I've thought about a lot of different interpretations of the story, and each one of them is flawed. But the flaws aren't the same, and I don't want to waste my time with "Well, if it's this, then it's this; but if it's that, then it's some other thing.
  
  I think it's clear enough that the narrator—an anthropologist who bemoans the homogenization of culture, the loss of an "other" to which he can compare himself—is meant to be critiqued. But because so much of what occurs is filtered through the narrator's egotism (a large part of the story takes place in his own imagined science-fictiony world), it's hard to say which troublesome aspects are being critiqued and which troubling aspects are being assumed implicitly and used as part of the critique of the other aspects. In all, there's a bad taste left in my mouth, and not all of it is deliberate.
  
  
• No. 154. "Union Dues - Freedom With a Small F" by Jeffrey R. DeRego (read by "Nuri"). A superhero is left to her own devices in the face of poverty. The story opens in a strip club, and at first Nuri's pleasant reading seemed . But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that the narrator is, in fact, extremely depressed and getting worse. And yet, the performance continued to project the pinnacle of banality. When the narrator stared at her adventuring costume in desparation as she realizes that the daily grind of her new life has left her neither the time nor the energy to confront anything else, the reader sounds like she's telling us about the apparently somewhat cute situation her overweight cat found itself while blogging.
  
  The action plot was good, but I again felt like much of the resonance of the story was lost on me because it's set in a larger world to which I have no connection. It appears that the circumstances of the protagonist's poverty have been engineered, implicating an institutional cruelty and disregard for autonomy, but since I don't know much about that world, I can't really care all that much.
  
  
• No. 155. "Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear (read by Stephen Eley). By a strange quirk of iTunes or RSS, I was unable to download this episode, getting an entirely different podcast instead.
  
  
• No. 156. "Distant Replay" by Mike Resnick (read by Steve Anderson). An old guy kinda stalks a young woman who resembles his dead wife. There's a weird way in which a lot of things that are presented as romance are really creepy, like the narrative that supposes that when someone says, "No," they really mean, "Keep asking me over and over." In this story, as well, there's a lot of creepy old-guy stalking that gets handwaved away as magical and romantic. It seems that in the world of this story, Fate itself is creepy and overbearing.
  
  
• No. 157. "A Small Room in Koboldtown" by Michael Swanwick (read by Cheyenne Wright). I couldn't listen to this one, but not for the usual reasons. Wright's very low voice was simply incomprehensible through on my headphones.
  
  
• No. 158. "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" by Ken MacLeod (read by Stephen Eley). I don't remember anything about this episode. It could be that I missed it accidentally, but I could just as easily have deliberately skipped it after only a very small amount of listening.
  
  
• No. 159. "Elites" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (read by Máia Whitaker). Veterans confront post-traumatic stress disorder. The setting is superb, and there's an interesting situation, but the story doesn't manage to capitalize on it, and the ending just kinds of slinks away while trying not to be scene. Whitaker provides another great performance, but it only makes the expository denouement seem more superfluous (much like in "Pressure").
  
  
• No. 160. "Kallakak's Cousins" by Cat Rambo (read by Stephen Eley). Turned off quickly because of the performance.
  
  
• No. 161. "Alien Promises" by Janni Lee Simner (read by Anna Eley). SF brings people together. There's really very little to this story. Ms. Eley had an accent that was new to me, and it took some adjustment, but after a little time, things went smoothly. In fact, the simple reading loaned authenticity to the incredibly glurgy story.
  
  
• No. 162. "God Juice" by M.K. Hobson (read by Christiana Ellis). I didn't listen to this one all the way through; I meant to finish, but it slipped off my iPod and hard drive. I hadn't even realized I'd missed the ending until now.
  
  
• No 163. "Revolution Time" by Lavie Tidhar (read by Stephen Eley). Turned off when it got to a female voice, which is my modus operandi for Eley readings.